I am far from the first person to notice this, but it really pisses me off.

Treyarch, the creators of Call of Duty, in the latest version let’s us decide to play as a woman. Other games have been doing this for a long time. So, have half a yay, Treyarch. Nevertheless, your player’s gender is not reflected in the script. There’s an argument I don’t want to have about whether this makes sense; it really just comes down to bucks.

But what really pisses me, and many other people, off is this character choice screen:

This was an incredibly expensive game to design. The graphics are awesome, the sets are amazingly detailed. In single-player campaign mode, it’s a full length action movie—albeit not a very good one—and is budgeted like one.

But Treyarch couldn’t be bothered to spend $2.50 more to add some non-white faces to the roster. Really?

Here’s a fairly random screen shot I picked up from the Web.

Keep in mind that this is about one sixth the resolution you get on a gaming PC. Treyarch can add intense detail to a gun or piece of shrapnel but can’t be troubled to design a few faces that aren’t white?

We’ve got a word for people who assume that the white race is the “real” race.

There are a lot of things wrong with how Starbucks implemented its “Race Together” program for which it deserves the mockery it’s been getting. Whether it was intended to stimulate discussions with busy baristas (“So, you want that with nonfat milk and we shouldn’t fill it to the brim. Right? What’s it like being white? Did you say ‘Nicky’ or ‘Mickey’?”) or among customers who in my experience have never struck up a conversation with another customer that was not met by a cold stare or a faked incoming text, it was unlikely to achieve its intended result. (Schultz seems to indicate it was to be a barista-to-customer conversation; see 0:20 in the John Oliver clip linked to “mockery” above.) Likewise, the overwhelming male whiteness of the Starbuck’s leadership team was an embarrassment waiting to happen. The apparent use of only white hands holding cups in the marketing campaign was inconceivably stupid (and yet still better than this).

Yet there’s much that Starbucks deserves praise for more than just its recognition that racial issues permeate our American culture and yet are more often papered over than discussed frankly.

They trusted their on-the-line employees to speak for themselves, and inevitably for the corporation as well, rather than relying on a handful of tightly constrained and highly compensated mouthpieces.

They did not supply talking points for their employees to mouth. That’s pretty awesome. On the other hand, they seem also to have provided no preparation for their baristas, as if anyone can figure out how to open up a productive conversation about race in America. The made-up phrase “racetogether” really isn’t enough to get a conversation going and off to a good start. (Michelle Norris’ Race Card Project might have provided a better way of opening conversations.)

Starbucks got lots wrong. Too bad. But not only was it trying to do something right, it did so in some admirable ways. Starbucks deserves the sarcasm but not just sarcasm.

[Disclosure: No, Starbucks isn’t paying me to say any of this. Plus I hate their coffee. (The fact that I feel the need to put in this disclaimer is evidence of the systemic damage wrought by “native ads” and unscrupulous marketers.)]

Wow. An adviser has explained to the Brits that Romney better understands and appreciates the UK because Romney is Anglo-Saxon:

We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,” the adviser said of Mr Romney, adding: “The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have”.

This is as close to a casually racist remark as we’re likely to get, at least I hope. I’m finding it hard how to take it otherwise. So, maybe the adviser thought he (she?) was making a positive statement about shared heritage, the way President Clinton might have talked about feeling a special bond with Ireland because of his Irish heritage. But I think this goes beyond tone deafness. This is not a statement of warm feeling, but a negative statement that without that shared heritage, you can’t really understand the UK. It is (to me) very clearly an attempt to boost Romney while declaring Obama to be Other: Obama can’t understand America because he’s not really one of us, where the “us” means Anglo Saxons. If there’s a more charitable way of taking this and its implications, let me know.

I only wish that the first stop had been Germany so that the adviser could have talked about how to fully appreciate the shared history we have with that country, we need an Aryan president.

“‘It’s not true. If anyone said that, they weren’t reflecting the views of Governor Romney or anyone inside the campaign,’ she told CBSNews.com in an email. Saul did not comment on what specifically was not true.”

In considering how much progress the United States has made toward racial equality, one aspect that has been hard to study has been the political system itself. Do legislators give preferential treatment to certain constituents? To answer this question, Butler and Broockman conducted a field experiment. They sent 4859 U.S. state legislators an e-mail asking about how to register to vote. The e-mail letter was signed by one of two aliases: Jake Mueller or DeShawn Jackson. Previous studies had indicated that these aliases were strongly associated with individuals identifying themselves as white or black, respectively. Alternate forms of the letter indicated no party affiliation or Democrat or Republican, resulting in six experimental situations. The DeShawn alias received significantly fewer responses than the Jake alias when a Republican affiliation or no party affiliation was given. Legislators (or at least their offices) from both political parties were more responsive when they thought the letter writer was from their own party. Minority legislators replied more frequently to the DeShawn alias than to the Jake alias. The authors conclude that racial discrimination is still present in U.S. politics.

…I googled to find out what they eat. I went to a helpful article in Time magazine, and discovered that foxes are 44% rabbit.

But the last sentence in the article gave me a WTF moment.

After I realized what was going on, it seemed to me that the article provokes several topics for discussion: The Demeaning Power of Condescension. The Ease with which an Entire Culture can be Trivialized. And, Please, People, Make Your Metadata More Obvious!

[NOTE: This post uses some awful words because they are important to what Lisa is researching. The spottiness of my liveblogging may be especially misleading in this post.] Lisa Nakamura is giving a Berkman talk called “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: Internet Games, Social Inequality, and Racist Talk as Griefing.” She’s going to talk about ROFLcon and Twitter. She begins by showing some tweets from ROFLcon that simply repeat the word “nigger.” She says that as a researcher, she’s not trying to place blame. She wants to know what these racist tweets are trying to accomplish. What are the ties between racism and social production in griefing?

ROFLcon is a conference celebrating Internet “memes.” Christina Xu from ROFLcon says that she thought that these tweets were coming from people who were not at ROFLcon. “It was straightup griefing,” says Lisa. And it didn’t happen during the race panel (which Lisa moderated). It happened during the keynote when Moot (Chris Poole, founder of 4chan) was speaking. Two years ago, there was boombox disruption of his talk.

The Net is an attention economy, says Lisa, and the use of words such as “nigger” enables you to “jump the line.” But, she says, there are lots of bad consequences. Chris Lander pointed out in a tweet that different platforms have different forms of hate: Racism is for the Internet, and homophobia is for Xbox (where players use”fag” as a generic insult). “Racism is a meme,” Lisa says; it works just like a meme. The word “nigger” has become completely toxic, which is why it’s used frequently by griefers [i.e., those out to disrupt an online activity]. “Griefing is about mocking those who take the Internet too seriously.” We are currently in a moment of what Lisa calls “enlightened racism,” in homage to Douglas’s “enlightened sexism“: You take the social gains and use it for permission to reintroduce retrograde images. E.g., “The Man Show” knew that it was ridiculously sexist to have women in bikinis bouncing on a trampoline. It’s all about the humor, the currency of Net memes. TV’s “post racial humor,” says Douglas, allows a nostalgia for sexism and racism, e.g., Mad Men. But, says Lisa, post-racial humor is a confusing mode for young people. The extremism of The Man Show’s sexism says (or so we would like to think) that there is no sexism, although of course there is. The N word is so extreme that to use it is to implicitly state that one is not racist and racism is no longer an issue (or so the users think), but it is.

She shows a video of 4chan’s “Patriotic Nigras” ruining a SecondLife social meeting (online, of course) just to “make people angry.” “Patriotic Nigras” are not primarily African-American. If you call out their racism, then say you’re a racist because it’s all about lols. (Or so they think.)

Leeroy Jenkins is quite famous for outrageousness at World of Warcraft, but people don’t talk about his adopting of minstrel-speak, Lisa says. You’re not supposed to talk about that, though, because it’s just about the lulz. It’s hard to call this out because you’ll be told you don’t get Net culture. To protest it is to declare oneself unqualified to comment on it. But, Lisa says, we need to teach children that racism is not acceptable. If sexting is bad, a child saying the N word over and over is also bad for that child. Youth are going online to interact. This is where they learn to be civil. We need to be able teach them. If the words are banned, they’ll count it as nothing more than “ass-hattery” to be routed around.

Lisa concludes by showing us a vid of some Chinese goldfarmers. “One’s person’s lulz is another’s non-lulz.”

To what extent does this racist humor occur in non-English cultures?
A [audience]: Donnie Dong said that on Chinese boards there are ethnic insults.
A: [lisa] Griefing is transnational.
A: [audience] Korean youths will sometimes play on American servers and announce that they’re young Koreans in order to annoy the older players.

A: How about YouTube comments that have racist comments? That doesn’t seem to be enlightened racism. Does enlightened racism provide an ethical framing for Youtube’s racist comments?
A: People do that on YouTube in part because there are so few other places where Americans can talk about race.

Q: Is racism or enlightened racism better?
A: I don’t think either is good. Enlightened racism is a symptom of a society that thinks that racism isn’t a problem any more.

Q: Will this change when the constituency of the people who determines the lulz changes?
A: Could you start a meme of blond frat boys invading a space and griefing?

Q: If you watch Arizona politics, the idea is that men are the underdogs now.

Q: Will enlightened racism eat itself? Maybe someone from the inside can critique it? Griefing the griefers? Is that happening?
A: [audience] At SomethingAwful, there’s a lot of calling people out.
Q: Maybe the enlightened racism meme will be tired?
A: I’d trace it to Dave Chappelle. He was unhappy that he had licensed people to say things they shouldn’t. He was mocking them, but it gave them license.

Q: Once there are more people online who are not white males…
A: People socialized into this culture may have a hard time of it transnationally, or in the workplace, or wherever this is not the idiom.

Q: This type of humor is balkanizing and isolating. Griefing is about shutting down conversation spaces….

Q: How do we know that it’s white males, since these are often anonymous posts? Might these be a deconstruction of racism? [E.g., gays taking back the word “queer.”]
A: I wish, but I don’t think so.

Q: How does enlightened racism affect structural racism?
A: Irony has become a mode that people retreat into when they don’t want accountability. Enlightened racism is still racism.

Q: Is it possible you’re conflating different forms of discourse? Maybe this is just a particularly disruptive form of static…
Q: Maybe it’s a form of play. It’s like playing violent video games: expressing something that you’re unable to express. It’s playing taboo, which is fun. Maybe it’s like a form of play in which the players know the rules. It may be a procedural rhetoric…
A: Yes. But who gets to decide? The people who are gay should be the ones who get to decide if “fag” is an insulting term, etc.

Annalee Newitz thinks Avatar is racist (as do I-ish), and points to interesting comments by Remington. Will Heaven points to a bunch of other sources as well. OuttaContext replies to the racism charge, seeing also a more inevitable and mythic story. But I think he underestimates the perniciousness of the specifics of the native culture the movie depicts: They’re not just the “other”; they’re blue native Americans.

By the way, do you think the Na’vi and JarJar Binx descend from some ur-stereotype progenitor??

Ethan is once again knowledgeable and provocative, this time about what it takes for a coup to get some attention in this country. He compares the media’s interest in Honduras’ institutional coup (as a guy called it last night on The News Hour) with the almost complete ignoring of various coups in Africa.

Ethan concludes (but read the whole thing):

So why does Honduras get the Iran treatment, while Niger is ignored like Madagascar? Proximity? Strategic importance? (though Niger’s got massive uranium reserves – you remember yellowcake, right?) It’s not population – Niger’s roughly twice the size of Honduras. Expectation? Perhaps we’re sufficiently accustomed to African coups (Madagascar, Mauritania and Guinea in the past year) that Niger’s not a surprise.

Like every New Yorker reader, I am perpetually behind. But I’ve been greatly enjoying reading issues from before the election. Knowing how it turns out relieves all the stress.

It also deepens the joy. Thomas Mallon has a terrific article (book review, actually) in the Oct. 13 issue, about how our view of Lincoln has changed over the years. For example, when the Lincoln Memorial was first opened, in 1922, Lincoln was celebrated as the Great Unifier, not the Great Emancipator. Here’s how the article concludes:

In 1909, the Reverend L. H. Magee, the pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Springfield, Illinois, voiced his disgust at the exclusion of blacks from the town’s centennial dinner, but he imagined that by the time of the bicentennial, in 2009, racial prejudice would be “relegated to the dark days of â€˜Salem witchcraft.’ ” Next year’s Lincoln commemorations in Washington will include the reopening of Ford’s Theatre, restored for performances for the second time since 1893, when its interior collapsed, killing twenty-two people. Congress will convene in a joint session on February 12th, and on May 30th the still new President will rededicate the Lincoln Memorial. The look and the emphasis of the occasion will have changedâ€”measurably, for certain; astoundingly, perhapsâ€”in the fourscore and seven years since 1922.